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Title Gender, public space and social segregation in Cairo: of taxi drivers, prostitutes and professional women
Full text http://dare.uva.nl/record/383450
Date 2009
Author(s) Koning, A. de
Abstract Cairo's cityscape has transformed rapidly as a result of the neoliberal policies that Egypt adopted in the early 1990s. This article examines the spatial negotiations of class in liberalizing Cairo. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of neoliberal policies on global cities of the South, few studies have adopted an ethnographic focus to examine the everyday negotiations of such transformations. I examine the ways young female upper-middle-class professionals navigate Cairo's public spaces, both the safe spaces of the upscale coffee shops and the open spaces of the streets. Their urban trajectories can be read as the footsteps of the social segregation that has increasingly come to mark Cairo's cityscape. I conclude that the bodies of upper-middle-class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo's upper-middle class in Egypt's new liberal age.
Type of publication Article / Letter to the editor
Format application/pdf
Source Antipode (00664812) vol.41 (2009) nr.3 p.533
Rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the copyright holder (usually the author), other then for strictly personal, individual use.
Repository Amsterdam - UvaPub, University of Amsterdam
Added to C-A: 2012-06-05;16:06:27